The Michigan Review

Earth Day & Eco-totalitarians

by C.J. Carnacchio

Well, once again its time for everybody's favorite leftist/statist holiday, Earth Day. Time for all those neo­hippies, Marxists, and general liberal do­gooders to strap on their Birkenstocks and do their best Chicken Little impressions. This is a particularly special Earth Day, since it is taking place in the shadow of the University's Environmental Brainwashing Semester. Today, all those little School of Natural Resources and Environment eco­stormtroopers will be out in full force preaching the coming of an environmental apocalypse.

For all the eco­wackos' rhetoric about global warming, deforestation, and endangered slugs, they never seem to mention the consequences of the Green ideology. The true agenda of the environmentalist movement is the decimation of individual liberty and the aggrandizement of State power. The environmental movement is merely a political Trojan horse by which the Left can further subordinate the individual to the State. Let's look at what the eco­totalitarians are really after.

Property Rights: Under the guise of defending the environment, the imperial Congress has been able to enact laws which allow government officials to confiscate private property, prevent landowners from using their property as the owner sees fit, levy fines of up to $25,000 a day for landowners who do not comply with their regulations, and even jail landowners who use their property for any other purpose than that which the State has dictated.

As Dixie Lee Ray wrote in her brilliant book Environmental Overkill, "With the stroke of a pen, a bureaucrat can declare private property to be a wetland, the habitat for a protected species, or a possible roosting place for a passing migratory bird, and the landowner can be prevented by law from doing anything with his land, other than continue to pay taxes on it. The landowner has no recourse save at enormous personal expense to sue the government."

What better way to control someone's property, and ultimately people themselves, than to subordinate one's private property rights to lofty environmental concerns. The environmentalists disparage property rights as a defense of materialism and greed. But, their attack on property rights is really an attack on individual liberty.

One of the foremost precepts of natural law is man's right to the possession and use of his property. Both Jeffersonian and Lockean political thought agree that the surest way for the State to erode its citizens' liberty is to control their property. Separate property from private ownership, and the State becomes master of all.

The Southern Agrarian philosopher Richard Weaver believed that the right of private property must be defended as "the last metaphysical right remaining to us." He declared private property to be one of the last places citizens can truly find refuge from the encroaching State and warned of the tyranny of the "propertyless bureaucrat." Political thinker Paul Elmer More defends property rights proclaiming, "Security of property is the first and all-essential duty of civilized community ... To the civilized man the rights of property are more important than the right to life."

Private property is so intimately linked with individual liberty that the Founding Fathers found it necessary to incorporate its protection into the Bill of Rights under the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." So, when the environmentalists attack private property rights in their Captain Planet crusading, they are really looking to strip the individual of his liberty and enslave him to the State.

Bureaucratic Tyranny: Under the Constitution, the preservation of freedom requires the dispersal and distribution of political power through a system of checks and balances. It is essential that no one branch of the federal government become more powerful than the others or usurp the powers of the other branches.

Unfortunately this is exactly what has happened to the regulatory arm of the State, the Bureaucracy. It has become the unofficial fourth branch of government; unelected and accountable to virtually no one. The powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have all been concentrated in the Bureaucracy. The Bureaucracy is allowed to function as a lawmaker and in cases involving its own regulations, it even serves as both judge and jury. Presidents, Congressmen, Senators, and Supreme Court justices may come and go, but the Bureaucracy remains entrenched and all powerful.

It is through the bureaucratic rogue elephant the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the environmentalists have had the greatest success in implementing their tyrannical agenda. In 1974, Irving Kristol correctly predicted the extent of the EPA's power today: "If the EPA's concept of mission is permitted to stand, it will be the single most powerful branch of the government, having far greater control over our individual lives than Congress, or the Executive, or state, or local government."

The EPA is currently allowed to confiscate and regulate private property, saddle businesses with overbearing and costly regulations, and impose its will on state and local units of government. No one dares question its dictates or the legitimacy of its authority. When a government agency is allowed to possess so much unchecked power, the liberty of a nation's citizens will become the true endangered species.

Economic Liberty: Essentially, the environmentalists are really Marxian socialists in a tree­hugging disguise. Environmental protection has become the new weapon of choice with which to attack free market capitalism. The environmentalists' hatred of private property, the free market, and the upper classes are all derivatives of the Marxist ideology.

Judy Bari, a representative of radical eco­terrorist group Earth First! was quoted in a June 25, 1992 column by economist Walter Williams saying, "I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it's possible under capitalism." Judy, do you remember the ecological disasters of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

According to political writer David Horowitz, in order to achieve the ecological balance the radical environmentalists advocate it would be necessary to progressively narrow "the gap to reduce the difference between the Earth's wealthiest and poorest inhabitants" until there are "more or less equal shares for all people." The proletariats' political potential fell short of the Marxists' expectations so now they have moved on to being the vanguard of dolphins and trees. When building a dictatorial political movement it is always good to represent an element that cannot think or speak; it cuts down on disagreements.

In attacking the free market, the environmentalists are looking to strip people of not only their economic liberty but also their political liberty, for the two intimately linked. As economist Milton Friedman pointed out, "[A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom ... The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other." In the environmentalists' so­called crusade to save the planet, their drive to enslave the world economically will ultimately lead to political enslavement as well.

In the end, the environmentalists' agenda will lead to death of liberty and the rise of an ecologically based totalitarian society. The environmentalists' may say that theirs is a noble crusade to save the planet, but let us not forget that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. MR

C.J. Carnacchio is the Managing Editor of the Review. He would like to set fire to that giant environmental sculpture and roast SNRE students over it.

This article was published in the 22 April 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 16, Number 10).
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